Yesterday Dala and I passed a late '90s Jaguar XK rolling on 20s. The car was in good shape, but the wheels looked awkward. I wonder if maybe 20s were too small and it would have looked better with stretched wheel wells and 22s.

My car's body and finish is so messed up from multiple hail storms and years of being baked in the sun, I've decided that a few bumper stickers won't hurt. I quickly decided that if a few bumper stickers won't hurt, completely covering the rear bumper with stickers until none of the paint can be seen is the way to go. I'm not gonna put on anything religious or political, so I'm just gonna do bumper stickers for local stores and such, or things that I think just look nifty. So far I have four stickers on there, all from local coffee shops, but ironically, none of them are shops I frequent on the regular.

Jobs

That job I talked about last week? I was offered it, and for specific reasons I won't go into, I turned it down. It was a hard choice for me to make, because I knew that if I didn't take the job and stayed where I'm at, I'll continue to be profoundly unhappy and stressed. If I did take that job though, I'd also be profoundly unhappy and stressed, but in different ways. It's amazing how having to choose between two awful choices can be so incredibly difficult.

Television

I'm almost done with Avatar: The Last Airbender. While I can't say it's really my thing, I completely understand why people like it. It's got some wonderful characters, good story development, and the two go hand in hand to show people grow and change. Out of everyone in the series, I think Uncle Iroh is my favorite, because he's not only a strong and loving man, he is a wonderful example of someone who has made the conscious choice to not only seek redemption and seek betterment, but to use what he's been through to help someone else who is walking down that same path. That's a good character to have, for any kind of story, not just one aimed at children.

The thing I loved most about Avatar (and The Legend of Korra) is the emotional depth to characters. I never got that in media I was allowed to consume as a kid, and I'm glad that that's different for some people!

I did appreciate that this series spent a considerable amount of time exploring ethics and character development in ways that a lot of cartoons I watched growing up didn't. But due to the target audience a lot of that exploration was very surface level though, especially compared to the overall setting that the story takes place in and some topics, such as the genocide of the Air Tribe or how the main hero Aang literally destroys fleets of ships with little effort and how whether or not he's wielding such power appropriately, aren't really concepts you can delve deeply into in a children's show with ease. That's not to say that the creators did a bad job telling a story, but man, the themes of this series are actually very big.

Now, to their credit, there are tons of shows and movies aimed at adults that touch on similar themes and don't even give them the exploratory consideration they deserve. So to get even the level we did in Avatar is kind of impressive, even more so since it was made about fifteen years ago.

I don't know how many people I started showing Avatar to. I was introduced to it through an online gaming friend about 12 years ago I think and it is still up there in my favorite animated series list.

Longer anime tend to lose their edge with time. The o ly one I still enjoy is One Piece.

You're the second person to tell me this recently. I'm kind of curious what makes them lose their edge. Do the stories just meander and drag on or does the storytelling get more sloppy? Or do you just kind of lose interest in the characters?

While I don't know if it's technically anime, Netflix's Voltron series was pretty frustrating to watch. As the series dragged on, plot points were often abandoned or rushed to be resolved, character development was often any combination of forced and unnatural, abrupt, or non-sensical. On and on I could go. In general, it felt like starting out the writers had a clear vision for where they wanted the story to go, but by season three, they were starting to say "Eh, whatever. We guess these ideas will work."